8 Step Pinterest Marketing Strategy In 2020 For Brands And Businesses

So you’ve heard that Pinterest is a great marketing tool for your business but you have no idea where to start!

In today’s post, I’m going to be breaking down how you can use Pinterest for business as well as my eight-step strategy that you can follow to grow your business on Pinterest quickly and effectively.

But before we talk more about how you can use this strategy, let’s talk a little bit about why Pinterest should matter for your business. Here’s why you should work on having a Pinterest marketing strategy:

Pinterest is not only a social media platform, but also a search engine currently used by over 335 million monthly viewers. That’s a massive audience that you can reach out to!

Marketing on Pinterest for your business or brand is completely free and you don’t need to have a large number of followers or pay a lot of money in ads to actually generate the kind of audience and reach that you would in other social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram.

Pinterest users are not only looking for information or looking to connect with their friends on this platform, but they’re actually looking for products and services that they can buy. So the intent to purchase on Pinterest is very high when you compare it to other social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook.

Step 1: Create A Business Profile

Step number one is to create and optimize your profile and bio for business.

A personal profile on Pinterest is different from having a business profile. So, what you need to do is to get a business account and claim your domain.

What this will do is that it will tell Pinterest exactly what your business is about and give it more information to actually understand your business in the search algorithm that Pinterest has.

Furthermore, to optimize your profile, you can also add keywords in your profile name or your username.

You can also add keywords to your bio, which is the space that Pinterest provides to you to include all of the top categories that you or your business operate in.

So, for example, if you’re a web designer and you have a design based business, then you could use keywords such as web designing or templates, etc., which reflect what kind of business you have and what products and services you sell.

Step 2: Create Pins For Your Website

Step number two is to create pins for all of your blog posts and important pages that you have online.

For this, you have to create vertical images in a 2:3 aspect ratio, which is recommended by Pinterest, with a text overlay, if applicable, to accurately reflect what your pin links to and this is how your content gets rewarded on Pinterest by using pins for all of your blog posts or your content online.

The best part about using Pinterest for business is that you are not limited to just promoting your content. You can also promote your products, your landing pages, your opt-in offers, your freebies. Pretty much anything and everything that has a link online can be promoted, especially if it links to your website through Pinterest.

Step 3: Join Group Boards

Group boards are boards with more than one contributor where you share your content and everyone contributes to sharing, saving and repining each other’s content.

What this does is that it increases your organic reach on Pinterest so that you can reach a much more people than you would have access to if you’re just starting out or have very few followers.

How do you find group boards?

There are two ways in which you can look for group boards online.

#1 Using the search algorithm.

Type the category of the group board that you’re looking for and then look for the group board icon. The group board icon is when you see pictures of two or three people in the profile image versus when you see the image of just one person, that is a personal board.

Click on these boards and see if they have a “request to join” feature. If they do, you can request to join the board directly. However, if that feature is not visible, you might have to read what is written on the board. See the rules and see how you can contact the contributor and send them a request via direct message or via email and that’s how you get to join that group board.

This tool synchronizes all of the information about group boards on Pinterest. So, it will tell you exactly which group board is open, how many contributors are available, which categories are doing better than the other, and you can essentially look for a lot of group boards outside of Pinterest.

If you want to do it categorically and you want to be able to do it in one place, then PinGroupie is an excellent tool for you to do this.

Step 4: Create Personal Boards For Category Topics

It isn’t enough to just join group boards when it comes to your Pinterest marketing strategy. If you’d like Pinterest to consider you a high quality pinner you need to ensure that you add category specific personal boards.

For example if you are a personal finance blogger, you can create personal boards on

How to Save Money

How to Payoff Debt

Budgeting Hacks

Investing Tips

Passive Income Ideas

Best Coupon Websites

Start with 5-10 category topics divided into sub-categories and create specific targeted personal boards for each topic. The more specific you can get, the better.

This helps Pinterest associate your account with particular keywords and topics as well as helps new users to find your content. Win-Win eh?

Step 5: Encourage People To Share and Save Your Pins

What is the point of promoting your business on Pinterest if the users that are coming to your website are not really sharing your pins across the web?

So there are two things that you can do.

Every pin that you upload on Pinterest, whether you upload that directly or save it through your website, make sure to add it to all of the relevant blog posts and all of the relevant content that it links to. So, if you create, for example, two or five pins, make sure that one of those pins is also represented in your blog post.

You can do to actually encourage users to save your content online and save it on Pinterest is to have a simple plugin like the Pin It Hover button.

There are tons of plugins that you can find in a similar category.

Use the Pin It button on image hover, which essentially gives the user an option to save the pin directly each time that they come across an image or a pin on your website. This is an excellent way to encourage the users to save your pins and your to their Pinterest accounts.

Step 6: Share Other People’s Content

Pinterest is a search algorithm, but it’s also a social media platform. And Pinterest cares a lot about the activity of the pinners on its platform.

What this means is that you don’t just need to save your own content, but you also need to be saving and sharing other people’s content to show Pinterest exactly what are the topics that you’re interested in and the fact that you’re an active pinner.

The more time you spend on the platform, of course, Pinterest likes that, just like any other social media platform, and this would help you increase your reach if you also share other people’s content and not just your own.

At the beginning when you don’t have a lot of your own pins, what you can do is follow a ratio of 60:40 which is 60% your own pins and 40% other’s pins. Eventually, over time you can actually increase that ratio in your favour.

When you have a lot of pins over time, you can switch to an 80:20 ratio where you will save 80% of your own content and 20% of other people’s content. Essentially what this does is that it shows Pinterest that you are a high quality pinner, that they should promote your content to other people and show it in different people’s feeds.

Step 7: Scale Up With A Pinterest Scheduler

Now that you’ve understood the basics behind how you can use Pinterest for business, what you can do is step number seven, which is actually scaling up with a scheduler like Tailwind.

Tailwind is a paid visual marketing tool that is a partner of Pinterest that schedules all of your content on Pinterest in a timely manner. So, for example, if you want to pin 25 times a day, however you don’t want to go to Pinterest 25 times and you don’t have the time to actually do that manually, you can use a scheduler like Tailwind to actually help you scale up your pinning and make Pinterest think that you are active on the platform more than you actually are.

The way I used Tailwind is that I generally schedule my pins on a weekly basis. I do keep track of the pins that are performing well. I share my new pins out on Tailwind on a weekly basis so that I have more time in my business to actually do other things than just spend all day on Pinterest.

Step 8: Track, measure, repeat!

The final step, which is step number eight is to track, measure and repeat.

Any business online needs to be measured by numbers, especially if you’re planning to do this long term. You can use Pinterest analytics for this purpose and if you have Tailwind, you can also use Tailwind insights as well as Google analytics for your blog to see what are the pins that are bringing you the most traffic and what are the pins that are bringing you the most conversions.

You can set up goals in your conversion in Google analytics and see which pins are performing the best, which are your highest converting pins, which are bringing you the most leads, so on and so forth.

Pinterest marketing strategy can be what makes or breaks your business in the coming years! You an check out my free Pinterest traffic masterclass to discover the 3 secrets of growing your audience like wildfire!

About Shruti Pangtey

Shruti is a travel blogger turned entrepreneur. Before she became an entrepreneur, she lived in three different countries, finished two master's degrees and helped scale multi-million dollar startups. Her advice has been featured in the Thrive Global, Matador Network, Her Campus, Medium and is an Amazon bestseller. Her mission is to help women creators become badass CEO's. When she isn't on her laptop, she's traveling the world, attempting a new yoga pose or learning a new language.